VI
REGARDLESS ORDERS

Ten hours' westing from the Missouri River takes a moderately fast train well into the great grazing region whose name is Length and Breadth, and whose horizon is like that of the sea. Since leaving Antelope Springs, however, the "Flying Kestrel" had been lagging a little. For this cause, the supper station was still more than an hour away when Brockway deserted his ancients and invalids and crossed the platforms to the rear door of the private car.

The admission that he dreaded the ordeal is not to be set down to his discredit. His life had been an arduous struggle, for an education and the necessities first, and for advancement afterward. In such a conflict, utility speedily becomes the watchword, and if the passenger agent were less of a workaday drudge than his fellows, he was modestly unaware of the fact.

In the course of the afternoon all the reasons why he should manage to get himself left behind at some convenient station were given a hearing, but love finally triumphed, and half-past six o'clock found him at the door of the Naught-fifty. Fortunately for his introduction, the occupants of the sitting-room were well scattered; and Gertrude came forward at once to welcome him.

"Thank you for coming," she said, putting her hand in his with the cordiality of an old friend; "I was afraid you might forget us, after all. Let me introduce you to my cousin, Mrs. Dunham; Cousin Jeannette, this is Mr. Brockway."

Brockway bent low in the direction of an elderly lady with a motherly face; bowed to the Misses Beaswicke and to Fleetwell, and acknowledged the President's nod.

"I'm only too happy to be permitted to come," he said to Gertrude, drawing up a chair to make a group of three with the chaperon. "The social side of a business man's life is so nearly a minus quantity that your thoughtfulness takes rank as an act of Christian charity."

Gertrude laughed softly. "Tell me how a business man finds time to acquire the art of turning compliments," she said; but Mrs. Dunham came to his rescue.

"I suppose your occupation keeps you away from home a great deal, doesn't it?" she asked.

"It certainly would if I had a home," Brockway replied.

"Do you have to travel all the time?"

"Rather more than nine-tenths of it, I should say."

"How dreadfully tiresome it must become! Of course, when one is seeing things for the first time it is very interesting; but I should imagine the car-window point of view would become hackneyed in a very little while."

"It does; and it is pathetically unsatisfying if one care for anything more than a glimpse of things. I have gone up and down in my district for four years, and yet I know nothing of the country or the people outside of a narrow ribbon here and there with a railway line in the centre."

"That is a good thought," Gertrude said. "I have often boasted of having seen the West, but I believe I have only threaded it back and forth a few times."

"That is all any of us do," Brockway asserted. "Our knowledge of the people outside of the railway towns is very limited. I once made a horseback trip through the back counties of East Tennessee, and it was a revelation to me. I never understood until then the truth of the assertion that people who live within sight of a railway all have the 'railway diathesis'."

"Meaning that they lose in originality what they gain in sophistication?" said Gertrude.

"Just that. They become a part of the moving world; and as the railway civilizing process is much the same the country over, they lose their identity as sectional types."

Mrs. Dunham leaned back in her chair and began to make mental notes with queries after them. Mr. Vennor had given her to understand that they were to have a rara avis, served underdone, for dinner; and, in the kindness of her heart, she had determined to see that the "young artisan," as her cousin had called him, was not led on to his own undoing. Now, however, she began to suspect that some one had made a mistake. This young man seemed to be abundantly able to fight his own battles.

"I presume you are very familiar with this part of the country – along your own line, Mr. Brockway," she said, when the waiter came in to lay the plates.

"In the way that I have just indicated, yes. I know so much of its face as you can see from this window. But my knowledge doesn't go much beyond the visible horizon."

"Neither does mine, but I can imagine," Gertrude said.

"Ah, yes; but imagination isn't knowledge."

"No; it's often better."

"Pleasanter, you mean; I grant you that."

"No, I meant more accurate."

"For instance?"

Gertrude smiled. "You are quite merciless, aren't you? But if I must defend myself I should say that imagination paints a composite picture, out of drawing as to details, perhaps, but typically true."

Brockway objected. "Being unimaginative, I can't quite accept that."

"Can't you? That is what Priscilla Beaswicke would call the disadvantage of being Occidentalized."

"I suppose I am that," Brockway admitted cheerfully. "I can always breathe freer out here between these wide horizons; and the majesty of this Great Flatness appeals to me even more than that of the mountains."

They followed his gesture. The sun was dipping to the western edge of the bare plain, and the air was filled with ambient gold. The tawny earth, naked and limitless, melted so remotely into the dusty glow of the sky as to leave no line of demarcation. The lack of shadows and the absence of landmarks confused the senses until the flying train seemed to stand with ungripping wheels in the midst of a slowly revolving disk of yellow flatness, through which the telegraph-poles and mile-posts darted with sentient and uncanny swiftness.

"I can feel its sublimity," Gertrude said, softly, answering his thought; "but its solemn unchangeableness depresses me. I love nature's moods and tenses, and it seems flippant to mention such things in the presence of so much fixity."

Brockway smiled. "The prairie has its moods, too. A little later in the year we should be running between lines of fire, and those big balls of tumbleweed would be racing ahead of the wind like small meteors. Later still, when the snows come, it has its savage mood, when anything with blood in its veins may not go abroad and live."

"I suppose you have been out here in a blizzard, haven't you?" said the chaperon; but when he would have replied there was a general stir, and the waiter announced:

"Dinner is served."

VII
A DINNER ON WHEELS

When the President's party gathered about the table, Mrs. Dunham placed Brockway at her right, with Gertrude beside him. Mr. Vennor disapproved of the arrangement, but he hoped that Priscilla Beaswicke, who was Brockway's vis-à-vis, might be depended upon to divert the passenger agent's attention. Miss Beaswicke confirmed the hope with her second spoonful of soup by asking Brockway what he thought of Tourguénief.

Now, to the passenger agent, the great Russian novelist was as yet no more than a name, and he said so frankly and took no shame therefore. Whereupon Mr. Vennor:

"Oh, come, Priscilla; you mustn't begin on Mr. Brockway like that. I fancy he has had scant time to dabble in your little intellectual fads."

Gertrude looked up quickly, and the keen sense of justice began to assert itself. Having escaped the pillory in his character of artisan, the passenger agent was to be held up to ridicule in his proper person. Not if she could help it, Gertrude promised herself; and she turned suddenly upon the collegian.

"What do you think of Tourguénief, Cousin Chester?" she asked, amiably.

"A good bit less than nothing," answered the athlete, with his eyes in his plate. "What is there about him that we ought to know and don't?"

"Tell us, Priscilla," said Gertrude, passing the query along.

But the elder Miss Beaswicke refused to enlighten anyone. "Go and get his book and read it, as I did," she said.

"I sha'n't for one," Fleetwell declared. "I can't read the original, and I won't read a translation."

"Have you read him in the original, Priscilla?" Gertrude inquired, determined to push the subject so far afield that it could never get back.

"Oh, hush!" said the elder Miss Beaswicke. "What is the matter with you two. I refuse positively to be quarrelled with."

That ended the Russian divagation, and it had the effect of making the table-talk impersonal. This was precisely what Mr. Vennor desired. What he meant to do was to set a conversational pace which would show Gertrude that Brockway was hopelessly out of his element in her own social sphere.

The plan succeeded admirably. So far as the social aspect of the meal was concerned, the passenger agent might as well have been dining at the table of the Olympians. Art, literature, Daudet's latest book, and Henriette Ronner's latest group of cats, the decorative designs in the Boston Public Library, and the renaissance of Buddhism in the nineteenth century – before these topics Brockway went hopelessly dumb. And not once during the hour was Mrs. Dunham or Gertrude permitted to help him, though they both tried with charitable and praiseworthy perseverance, as thus:

Mrs. Dunham, in a desperate effort to ignore the Public Library: "I'm afraid all this doesn't interest you very much, Mr. Brockway. It's so fatally easy – "

Fleetwell, whose opinion touching a portion of the design has been contravened by Mr. Vennor: "I say, Cousin Jeannette, isn't the Sargent decoration for the staircase hall – " et sequentia, until Brockway sinks back into oblivion to come to the surface ten minutes later at a summons from the other side.

Gertrude, purposely losing the thread of Priscilla Beaswicke's remarks on the claims of theosophy to an unprejudiced hearing: "What makes you so quiet, Mr. Brockway? Tell me about your other adventures with the school-teachers – after you left Salt Lake City, you know."

Brockway, catching at the friendly straw with hope once more reviving: "Then you haven't forgotten – excuse me; Miss Beaswicke is speaking to you." And the door shuts in his face and leaves him again in outer darkness.

In the nature of things mundane, even the most leisurely dinner cannot last forever. Brockway's ordeal came to an end with the black coffee, and when he was free he would have vanished quickly if Gertrude had not detained him.

"You are not going to leave us at once, are you?" she protested.

"I – I think I'd better go back to my 'ancients and invalids,' if you'll excuse me."

Gertrude was conscience-stricken, and her hospitable angel upbraided her for having given her guest an unthankful meal. Wherefore she sought to make amends.

"Don't go just yet unless you are obliged to," she pleaded. "Sit down and tell me about the schoolma'ams. How far did you go with them?"

"I had to make the whole blessed circuit," he said, tarrying willingly enough.

"Do you often have such deliciously irresponsible people to convoy?"

"Not often; but the regular people usually make up for it in – well, in cantankerousness; that's about the only word that will fit it." Brockway was thinking of the exacting majority in the Tadmor.

"And yet it doesn't make you misanthropic? I should think it would. What place is this we are coming to?"

"Carvalho – the supper station."

Gertrude saw her father coming toward them; she guessed his purpose and resented it. If she chose to make kindly amends to the passenger agent for his sorry dinner, she would not be prevented.

"We stop here a little while, don't we?" she asked of Brockway.

"Yes; twenty minutes or more. Would you like to go out for a breath of fresh air?" She had risen and caught up her wrap and hat.

"I should; it is just what I was going to propose. Cousin Jeannette, I'm going to walk on the platform with Mr. Brockway. Come," she said; and they escaped before Mr. Vennor could overtake them.

Once outside, they paced up and down under the windows of the train, chatting reminiscently of four bright days a year agone, and shunning the intervening period as two people will whose lives have met and touched and gone apart again. At the second turn, they met Mrs. Dunham and Fleetwell; and at the third, the President, sandwiched between Hannah and Priscilla Beaswicke. Whereupon Brockway, scenting espionage, drew Gertrude away toward the engine.

The great, black bulk of the heavy ten-wheeler loomed portentous, and the smoky flare of the engineer's torch, as he thrust it into the machinery to guide the snout of his oil-can, threw the overhanging mass of iron and steel into sombre relief.

Brockway shaded his eyes under his hand and peered up at the number beneath the cab window. "The new 926," he said; "we'll get back some of our lost time behind her."

"Do you know them all by name?" Gertrude queried.

"Oh, no; not all."

"I suppose you've ridden on them many times?"

Brockway laughed. "I should say I had – on both sides, as the enginemen say."

"What does that mean?"

"It's slang for firing and driving; I've done a little of both, you know."

"I didn't know it. Isn't it terribly dangerous? When anything happens, the men on the engine are almost always killed, aren't they?"

"When they are it's because they haven't time to save themselves. It's all nonsense – newspaper nonsense, mostly – about the engineer sticking to his post like the boy on the burning deck. A man can do whatever there is to be done toward stopping his train while you could count ten, and no amount of heroism could accomplish any more."

"I have often thought I should like to ride on an engine," Gertrude said.

"I wish I had known it earlier in the day; your wish might have been gratified very easily."

"Might it? I suppose they never let any one ride on the night engines, do they?"

Brockway caught his breath. "Do you mean – would you trust me to take you on the engine to-night?" he asked, wondering if he had heard aright.

"Why not?" she said, with sweet gravity.

The engineer had oiled his way around to their side, and Brockway spoke to him.

"Good-evening, Mac," he said; and the man turned and held up his torch.

"Hello, Fred," he began; and then, seeing Gertrude: "Excuse me, I didn't see the lady."

At a sign from Gertrude, Brockway introduced the engineer. "Miss Vennor, this is Mr. Maclure – one of our oldest runners."

"I'm very glad to know you, Mr. Maclure," said Gertrude, sweetly; and the man of machinery scraped his feet and salaamed.

"Mac, Miss Vennor thinks she would like to take a night spin on the 926. May we ride a little way with you?"

"Well, I should say!" assented Maclure. "Just pile in and make yourselves at home; and excuse me– I hain't quite got through oilin' 'round yet."

"Thank you," said Brockway; then to Gertrude: "We must find your father or Mrs. Dunham quick; we haven't more than a minute or two."

They ran back and fortunately came upon Mrs. Dunham and the collegian.

"Cousin Jeannette, I'm going to ride on the engine with Mr. Brockway," Gertrude explained, breathlessly. "Don't say I sha'n't, for I will. It's the chance of a lifetime. Good-by; and don't sit up for me."

"I'll take good care of her," Brockway put in; and before the astonished lady could expostulate or approve, they were scudding forward to the 926.